It’s going to be a very busy autumn, for sure. The impact will be felt especially by systems administrators and Microsoft partners.
First of all, Microsoft is indeed phasing out basic authentication. I hope that end-users will not feel the changes in the technical guts of Microsoft 365 authentication too much. Good sysadmins have already made sure that users will be able to continue to log in to the services even after October 1.

Secondly, Microsoft is radically changing its partner ecosystem to better respond to the new complex reality of cloud computing. The unfortunate consequence of the changes will be that many smaller partners will no longer get the incentives they were geting so far.

Have a really great day.
Matic Z.

[FEATURED STORY] OneDrive is 15 years old

Exactly 8 years ago, I published an opinion piece in one of the computer magazines ranting about the reliability of OneDrive for Business. Back in 2014 OneDrive for Business was a half-baked product, full of flaws and not remotely suitable for business use. Consumer-oriented OneDrive was a wholly different and more reliable service at the time.
And today? OneDrive just works and I don’t even wonder anymore what it does in the background, how and when it synchronizes. It works. Which basically means that it is a mature product.
Interestingly, back in 2002, I was using Groove. Microsoft acquired Groove Networks in 2005 and built SharePoint and OneDrive on top of it.

15 reasons to love OneDrive. I really wish I would have written this article 8 years ago. Today, all these 15 reasons are valid.

How to Share Your OneDrive with External Users. How to share content with external users without exposing your organization to security risks. Proper sharing is important.

Microsoft Teams :How to assign participants to breakout room before the meeting starts? Handling breakout rooms in Teams is still complicated for no good reason. I still miss the possibility for participants to choose which room to go to.

Bookings with me. Great idea for a service. Currently still in the preview phase. Finally, I will be able to get away from using some third-party services like Calendly and use what Microsoft 365 has to offer.

Teams Real Simple with Pictures: Setting your Download Location in the Teams Desktop Client. We are all creatures of habits. I never got used to the default download folder in the operating system. I always make my own folder structure to suit my habits. Here are some instructions on how you can change the default download folder in Teams.

---

Microsoft Exchange Online cross-tenant SMTP domain sharing private preview. Although I myself am a little doubtful that this thing will be available before next summer, I am already looking forward to it. According to the roadmap entry, the public preview will be available at the end of this year. Why is this important? One domain in several tenants. In some places, these are the requirements of the legal department in the company. Or there may be such a need due to a merger, acquisition or divestiture.

Migrate Office 365 Inactive Mailboxes and Deleted OneDrives. Learn how to migrate Office 365 inactive mailboxes and deleted OneDrives to comply with retention policies. With PowerShell, of course.

Time-limited admin roles in Microsoft 365. It is always a good idea to limit the duration of privileges for admin users. This is best practice in these crazy times of identity theft.

---

August 22 to 23 – Back to School: IT Admins BootCamp. A must-attend for all sysadmins working in education. Free.

September 19 to 23 – Data, Artificial Intelligence & Advanced Analytics Summit. SQL Server, Power BI, Azure SQL, AI, Arc, Pureview, … Free summit.

---

The many ways to implement multi-factor authentication. There are 5 different ways to enable MFA in Microsoft 365. Which one suits you best?

Ransomware and SharePoint Online: What to take away from the ProofPoint article? Not long ago, ProofPoint pointed out one of the SharePoint functionalities that could be a major security hole in the service. Thibault analyses the article and draws some conclusions. How serious is the risk?

 Protect Office 365 Sensitive Data with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Policy. Back to basics. How to use Microsoft 365 features to protect your organisation from information leakage?

---

Microsoft open sources over 1,500 3D emoji (no Clippy though). Every designer’s wet dream, so to speak. Now they will be able to change the emojis to suit them better.

---

DATES TO KEEP IN MIND

October 1, 2022 – Basic Authentication Deprecation in Exchange Online. This may fast become a serious issue for unprepared organizations.

October 3, 2022 – New rules for achieving MS partnership designations are in place.

April 11, 2023 – Exchange Server 2013 – End of support.

[April 11, 2023 – Microsoft Office 2013 – End of support. You might experience performance or reliability issues if you continue to use Office 2013 with Microsoft 365 services because it will no longer be a supported client to connect to M365. This seems no longer true according to this article. I will closely follow the MS statements regarding Office 2013 and 2019 connectivity.]

---

The Sample. A whole new way of discovering exciting email newsletters. Sign up and you will get sample newsletters based on the interests that you’ve tagged.

---

---

☁️ Last but not least …

Here are a few things you can do if you enjoyed reading this newsletter:

• Become a subscriber: m365 Weekly Newsletter Subscribe
• Explore past issues: m365 Weekly Newsletter Archive.
• Get in touch / Share cool M365 or other stuff: matic@m365weekly.com

Did someone forward this email? Sign up for the weekly newsletter here.

Click to subscribe